Dave Stewart has long been one of the most loved and respected musicians this country has produced. The intelligence and care with which he tackles his musical outpouring is as evident today as when he first recorded with Egg, way back in 1968. Here at Terrascope Towers we were understandably overjoyed when the venerable Mr. Stewart agreed to guide us through his long and colourful career. Here then is the first part of what promises to be a classic treat over the coming months for all you fans of Egg, Hatfield & The North, National Health, Bruford and the Canterbury scene in general:

1968 - 1972/3

I went to a public (= private) school called The City Of London School. You didn't have to be particularly posh to go to this school, but your parents had to be pretty rich to meet the fees. My parents were pretty poor, but I circumvented the commercial considerations by winning a scholarship. This, and getting a No. 1 single in 1981, were the highest achievements of my life according to my mum -  all the bits before and in between have been crap.

  Anyway, at the aforementioned C. of L.S. I met two extraordinary oiks named Steve Hillage and Hugo Martin Mongomery-Campbell, like me ink-bespattered, vaguely rebellious, academically unfocussed and interested in music. I can still remember Steve Hillage in short trousers and a cap, but have managed to resist the temptation to sketch them in, in biro, on his album covers.

  I was an embryonic guitar-twanger when I met these guys, but Steve was so far ahead of me in that field (his parents had bought him a Strat and an AC30, and he could play barre chords) that I soon gave it up in favour of the organ. Mont played bass, guitar, piano and everything else and he and Steve formed a band, in the 6th form (1967). I was desperate to join, and made myself indispensible by helping them carry their amps etc. We were into Cream/Hendrix, the Blues, progressive and psychedelic stuff - I was particularly into the Nice. Steve used to do a lot of guitar solos and we used to do versions of 'Foxy Lady', 'Rondo' (for me), innumerable Fleetwood Mac/Cream songs and no original material! We were pretty much a school band, but not a bad one. and we found a drummer (East Ender Clive Brooks) through an ad. in Melody Maker. The day we auditioned Clive, Steve and Mont went out for a coffee - we were rehearsing in an office block in Baker St. where Mont's dad used to work  - and met Jimi Hendrix in the street. He was staring at the window of the Beatles' 'Apple' shop, and Steve approached him and asked him to come up and have a play with us. He was very nice about it, but said he was too busy.... I wish he'd had a bit more time!

  Uriel (for that was the name of our band) did a few youth club type gigs but then, in the summer of '68, we got our BIG BREAK. A totally trustworthy gentleman called Johnny Quinn offered us a residency at the Ryde Castle Hotel on the Isle of Wight. We'd get to play every night, free accommodation and a chance to rehearse in the venue every afternoon. Actually, the landlady of the hotel, a venerable woman named Mrs. Ross, took one look at Steve and Mont's bare feet and afro hair and refused us permission to even enter the hotel during daylight hours. We ended up sleeping in the van and having to rehearse silently (difficult!), but we managed to knock up one or two original tunes, written by Mont - "Egoman" is one title I remember.

  The Ryde Castle Hotel gig was basically shit, but we got to support Arthur Brown and Fairport Convention. At the end of the summer, Steve Hillage said he was quitting to go to university. A shame, for as Clive Brooks remarked to me in later years, "If Steve had stayed, by now we'd be as good as the Mahavishnu Orchestra"... think he's right, readers?

  As a trio, Uriel dropped all their blues numbers and began to develop a more classical leaning with Mont's polytonal harmonies and my sub-Emerson light classical bits. We fell in with Middle Earth, the psychedelic club in Covent Garden, and got to play there every fortnight supporting the likes of Captain Beefheart and Love Sculpture. The "managers" of Middle Earth, two semi-likeable chaps called Dave and Paul, started an agency and offered to manage us. One condition- we had to change our name. 'Uriel' was too weird and, get this, apparently sounded too much like 'URINAL'!!!

  And so, Egg was born. We hated the name, but it was popular with typesetters. We started to get more gigs (probably because the posters were so cheap - I remember doing a gig at the Doncaster Top Rank Suite where the bill was 'Yes', 'If' and 'Egg' - a coincidence? Surely not. We blew Yes off the stage, incidentally...)

  Egg was part of the Middle Earth package of bands that included 'The Writing On The Wall' (who did an absolutely brilliant opening number where the singer used to stand on the organ and leap off), and Decca Records were offered this package for an intended Middle Earth label. I don't know whether Dave and Paul ever got the label started, but Decca approached us separately (I guess they must have done a demo. Where is that now?!?) and said they wanted to sign us.

  By now we were doing all "original" material, although some of it was nicked from Stravinsky, Holst etc, and we were reconciled to being an organ trio. At first we missed the guitar, but after auditioning a bit we realised not many guitarists were as good as Steve so we decided not to replace him with an inferior model. We did at least two BBC Radio sessions - best one was the Pete Drummond Show - and a BBC2 television show called 'Colour Me Pop' (!) presented by Michael Parkinson.

  At the time of recording our first LP ('Egg' - wotta title!) for Decca things were going well and the band was growing in popularity. It continued to improve for a year or so, but then after recording 'The Polite Force' album Decca told us they didn't want to release it. Why, then, had they let us record it? Because someone in the sales/marketing department had failed to speak to someone in the contracts dept. presumably; but attempt to understand the workings of record company's employees' minds and you'll end up as mad as they are. This is the worst thing you can do to a band though - let them sweat blood over recording an album they're really proud of, with all its false starts, nerves, anxiety, eventual triumphant completion of good backing tracks, hours of overdubbing, problems with headphones, more nerves, the occasional brilliant bit of playing, arguments about the mix, persuading the drummer the snare's loud enough, getting through the mix without fucking up, making sure all the mixes are the right level, sorting out the running order - and then say, "Oh, by the way - we're not putting it out". This has happened to my friend Jakko THREE TIMES. No wonder he's a little cynical about the record business.

  Although Decca eventually changed their corporate mind, persuaded partly by our producer Neil Slaven who was a Decca employee, the blow to band morale was quite bad, and it coincided with gigs beginning to dry up. We had no contacts outside Britain, which meant we had to concentrate on touring this wretched little island where, in truth, not enough people care about music that is a bit...uh...weird, or different at least. Finally we fell in with a bod called Roy Fisher  who was manager of that venerable blues organisation, The Groundhogs. Pete's brother had, in fact, formerly been a member of the band. Despite the stunning incompatibility of our musical styles, we were stuck out on tour together doing the Colston, Free Trade, Birmingham Town, Newcastle Town Hall sort of venue - the Groundhogs headlining, of course. Tony McPhee was friendly enough in a gruff kind of way, but he got a bit cross when closely questioned on how come our soundchecks only lasted 3 minutes.

  My memories of that era are quite strong. The bit in 'Spinal Tap' where they get lost trying to find the stage is particularly funny to me, as exactly that happened to me in some big Sheffield civic institution. Three minutes before the gig, I wandered off for a piss. 10 minutes later, I was still in the bowels of the building, clambering over packing crates, pieces of disused scenery from Norman Wisdom's 'Aladdin' show circa 1958, etc. I thought I could hear the crowd jeering and booing, but it might have been the civic plumbing. "The show must go on!", eh? How?

  The gigs with the 'Hogs sort of toughened us up. It's like, you go into Green's Playhouse, Glasgow (now The Apollo) a dilettante, pretentious youth concerned about ART, and you come out a MAN ready to ROCK & ROLL and start a FOOD FIGHT at the BLUE BOAR. On one of the tours, Egg and The Groundhogs were joined by a great Welsh outfit called Quicksand - to be honest, they were the best band on the bill. But the 'Hogs always went down the best, generally provoking a sort of Pavlovian screaming riot that I found a bit disturbing. Tony McPhee and Ken (the drummer) seemed to be totally unaware of it, they just spent the whole time complaining about the monitors and how their "amps" were "crap".

  Let's leave Egg for a bit and talk about ARZACHEL who, as everyone now knows, were Uriel operating under a pseudonym. Uriel never did any recording, for the simple reason that we didn't have any original material - we were only schoolboys, remember. However, as soon as Egg had signed to Decca Records, the possibility of a Uriel LP came up. What happened was, we knew a chap called Peter Wicker who ran a demo studio called "Studio 19" in Gerrard St, Soho. He had some connections with a foreigner named "Zak" who was running a label called "Zel" (or was it the other way round?) Anyway, Zak had noticed (somewhat belatedly) that "psykodalic" music was shifting a lot of units, so he asked Wicker to be on the lookout for a likely bunch of lads who knew how to make a noise. We had worked for Peter in his demo studio, thusly: An aspiring songwriter would send a cassette of his or her song with a view to having it "professionally" recorded. Peter would ring us up and we would attempt to work out the chords and bang out a version, with Mont handling the vocals. Unfortunately some of our efforts were so approximate that the client demanded his money back, but that's showbiz!! Again though, WHERE ARE THOSE TAPES NOW?!?

  Peter alerted us to the possibility of making a psychedelic album for Zak's label, and we were keen. Problem was, we'd signed an exclusive deal with Decca some weeks previously. Hence, the psudonym. We drafted Steve Hillage (by now a student at Kent University) in to add psychedelic noise atmosphere and further disguise the Egg-ness of the project. The songs on Side One were specially written for the LP. Side Two was a "psychedelic jam" (a style we were expert in after many hours spent at the Middle Earth club) with nothing much pre-arranged except that it had to be long enough to fill the side - we actually held the last chord on for ages while watching the studio clock tick round; as soon as it hit the quarter past, we stopped playing.

  The budget - including our advance - was £250. We recorded and mixed it in one afternoon. We didn't know anything about recording, so if it sounds underwater it wasn't really anyone's fault. All I knew was, put some reverb on the organ!

  I'm surprised that anyone ever got interested in this LP, because we only gave it about 10 minutes thought. It was supposed to be a secret, but a guy called Philip - friend of "Jesus" (nee Bill Jellet, he of the white kaftan and nuts and berries - Bill was a good mate of ours) - got to know about it and told Melody Maker the sordid facts. I guess we would have owned up in time, but we were pissed off with Philip at the time.

  Anyway, back at Egg. Following the Groundhogs tour, things got tough. We had enough material for a third album, but no deal and very few gigs. Mont decided to call it a day, as he was getting into a kind of spiritual quest that would not be enhanced by endless trips up and down the M1, even with the incentive of a fry-up at the Blue Boar thrown in. Clive and I were very upset at Mont's decision, but we didn't try to argue with him as we sort of sensed he'd made up his mind, and anyway, even if he'd stayed, we had no work! Clive had the idea of asking Hugh Hopper to join, but at that stage I didn't have the confidence to contemplate becoming the main writer in the group - traditionally Mont's role - so the band split up.

  Future events were to partly compensate for the lack of interest that led to the band's demise, as in 1974 we got the opportunity to reform the band for the album 'The Civil Surface'. This effectively mopped up the unrecorded material from the post-Polite Force era, though we had to pad it out a little with some wind quartets Mont had written - not really Egg material! Although the mix on the 'Civil Surface' is a bit naff, (we couldn't persuade Clive that the drums were loud enough) I'm really glad we recorded 'Enneagram', one of my favourite Egg pieces. We used to steam through that at gigs - our opening number - and peoples' faces would drop.

  As for Steve Hillage's career around this time - within minutes of leaving Uriel and setting foot in the hallowed portals of Kent University (which is, of course in CANTERBURY, hours of waffle about which will come later), Steve had met singer Barbara Gaskin, now my recording partner and sweetheart. For this I am eternally grateful to him. Steve was apparently under the impression that universities were brimming with brilliant musicians waiting for the opportunity to fling aside their copies of "The Medium Is The Message" by Marshall McCluhan, seize bass guitars or drum kits and lock immediately into a tight groove over which Steve would extemporize brilliant Stratocaster solos. Meeting Barbara was a good start, but the perfect rhythm section Steve had dreamed of was not to be found on the campus. After a year of abortive study (which all too frequently mutated into Occupying The Refectory and other popular student sports of the late 60's, such as Berating The Administration and Organising The Folk Club) - he packed it all in and came back to London to start his own band, 'Khan'.

  Khan were "managed" by Terry King, who also managed, or at least took money from, Caravan. Steve found a good rhythm section in Eric Peachey (drums) and Nick Greenwood (bass - ex-Crazy World of Arthur Brown), but he never seemed to settle on the right organist. There was a chap called Dick, a nice enough guy and a good keyboard player, but there were some problems; apparently his girlfriend wouldn't let him do gigs on Sundays because that was the day she liked to cook him a special dinner. Or something. Anyway, by the time Khan came round to doing their 1st LP (again for good old Decca) no permanent organist had been found, so I did it as a guest musician. I was in Egg at the time, but was happy to play on the LP because I liked Steve and his songs. Eric Peachey was a great guy, too. He had long blonde hair and a really long ginger beard, so all you could see was this permanent smile. He also wore really bright coloured towelling socks that I have subsequently adopted as a personal fashion myself. (No, no - this kind of stuff is important!)

  It is a fact that, after Egg split up in 1972, I joined Khan as a full-time member - but this was shortlived. We did a handful of gigs, after which Steve broke the band up. It was a lot of pressure on him - 3 organists and 2 bassists in two years is a lot when you're trying to rehearse complex arrangements - and he would stay up all night writing the charts. Terry King's management had a strong leaning towards the you-do-all-the-work and I'll-take-the-commission style, and I always thought his permanent suntan made an interesting contrast with Steve's deathly pallor. So it wasn't a big surprise when Steve announced to us that he was off to France to play guitar with Kevin Ayers, and Khan was to be "diskhantinued".

  This unsurprising development left me out of work, with no immediate prospects for musical employment. How I filled the intervening months before a casual call from drummer Pip Pyle changed my life is perhaps best not discussed on the pages of a musical magazine read by, I imagine, sensitive artistic types; suffice it to say that society in general and casual employment agencies in particular have dreamed up unimaginable tortures and humiliations for the unemployed organist "resting" between engagements.

Hatfield and The North

Hatfield and The North, and later National Health, were responsible for producing some of the most innovative, complex, majestic and downright entertaining rock music ever to come out of England. It was largely down to the presence of composer and musician Dave Stewart in each of these legendary combos that kept them outside of the jazz conventions they veered towards and enabled exploration of the more adventurous realms of rock music that they became justly renowned for. In this second part of his Story, Dave Stewart steers us through the rocky waters of the Music Business of the 70's, and in particular his part in the story of Hatfield And The North...

HATFIELD & THE NORTH 1973 - '75

After Egg split up, I spent some time doing menial jobs. These were mostly of a cruel and arbitrary nature, stuff that nobody else wanted to do: delivering mattresses to unbuilt hotel rooms, stuffing envelopes with invitations to sporting events that had taken place three weeks previously - that sort of thing. All very Kafka-esque, and rather depressing. I was living in a horrible house in South London with a bunch of bastards whose idea of communal living was to label the milk bottles "Kim's" or "Anne's" and draw  up endless charts showing whose turn it was to do the washing up. It was usually mine. Was this how the rest of my life was to be?

  Evidently not, because one day I got a call from a chap I vaguely knew called Pip Pyle. The line was bad and Pip tends to mumble down the 'phone, but I picked out "...new band... gig... at the moment... Dave Sinclair..... Hammond organ...... tape......". This sounded promising, so I invited Pip over to elucidate. When he arrived, he played me a tape of some of the most incomprehensible music I had ever heard, and studied my reaction keenly. This was, apparently, an early gig tape of Hatfield & The North with Dave Sinclair playing organ, but the sound quality was so terrible I couldn't hear anything. "Sounds interesting", I lied. we arranged for me to cart my Hammond over to Phil Miller's flat in Richmond so we could have a play.

  There I met Richard Sinclair and Phil, both of whom I was vaguely acquainted with, and we bashed through 'Nan True's Hole' and some other tunes. At the end of the audition, Pip said to me smilingly "Well Dave, I think it's fair to say that you're in the group now", at which point Phil butted in with "I don't think it's fair to say that at all!" and the two of them went off into the kitchen and had a row. I later learned that this row, or variations of it, had been going on since they were eighteen months old, as they had both grown up together in the same Hertfordshire village. The conflict was probably originally based on the misappropriation of some toy or another. As it's now 1989 and the two of them still play in a band together, I think it lends weight to the theory that the most durable partnerships are ones where the partners can let off a little steam.

  Anyway, I never found out whether I got the gig or not, because before this larger issue could be settled Pip said they had a gig on Friday, and could I do it. This meant learning over an hour's worth of music, played without a break a la Matching Mole, in two days. Being a true professional, game old trouper, seasoned veteran, hardened campaigner, tough cookie, consummate entertainer and above all a STUPID BASTARD, I agreed. We played the gig, at South Morden College of Anaesthetists (or somewhere), I bluffed my way through (constantly scrutinizing dozens of sheets of manuscript paper and wondering where we'd got to), stopping occasionally when I got too lost, and the first hurdle was crossed.

  I discovered that I was stepping into a slot previously occupied by Phil's brother Steve, as well as Dave Sinclair, but it turned out that although the lads preferred the fuller organ sound to the lighter electric piano approach of Steve Miller, their real role model for the Hatfield keyboardist was Dave MacRae, ex- Matching Mole. I realised that in order to fulfil the band's expectations, I was going to have to do two things: (1) Get an electric piano, and (2) learn to play jazz, or something close.

  I must come clean at this point and say I am not a big jazz fan. I can appreciate, and sometimes enjoy, the musicianship involved, but there are too many conventions involved for me to really get off on it. On the other hand though, I had reached the stage where I needed to broaden my musical horizons a little. The neo-classical precision of Egg had given me enough technique to play most written rock music, but my improvising and ability to respond to what other musicians were playing needed to be worked on. I figured that playing with Hatfield and The north would help me develop a bit in those areas, and if the results were a little jazzier than what I was used to, it wasn't the end of the world... and it was certainly better than delivering mattresses.

  The electric piano problem was solved by an incredible piece of good luck. Pip had met Simon Draper and Richard Branson, who were about to start up Virgin Records. Simon liked what he heard of Hatfield (surely not the cassette Pip had played me? Jesus Christ...) and wanted to SIGN THE BAND UP! There you go; unbelievable, isn't it? You start up a band playing uninterrupted riffs for an hour with two other blokes playing crazed solos over the top, play in a couple of technical colleges and the next thing you know two incipient moguls show up and start asking how much money you want to record an LP of this stuff. Those were the "good old days". If only it was like that now...

  I quite liked Richard Branson when I first met him. He invited us to his houseboat and played us 'Tubular Bells', which I told him would never sell. He also settled a dispute over whether Virgin should get our publishing or not, by challenging us to a game of darts in a local pub. We lost. All the music I wrote from 1973 to 1978 is still owned by Virgin Music. Subsequently, I have come to dread his seemingly nightly T.V. appearances - so, his latest boat/balloon/aeroplane has crashed in the Irish Sea? Why is this fucking NEWS? - and have watched with horror his burgeoning association with Margaret Thatcher, which will probably end up with him becoming Minister of the Arts. I also realise that Richard doesn't like music very much, except as a premise from which to go on and make more money. But back then, he was only a proto-mogul, and compared to some of the miserable old motherfuckers I'd known at Decca (who had names like Sir William Waldegrave and Lord Henry Fitzgerald Montgomery-Mountbattenshire) he didn't seem a bad type.

  One of the early group rows was about how to split up the advance money. I think we had about £2,000 to spend on equipment. Half of that went immediately on a "Zoot Horn" P.A. system, some more on a dodgy old van, until there was only about £800 left. The others insisted that I take £400 and buy a Fender Rhodes electric piano, even though my share should really have been only £200. They went on and on about it, and, as I said earlier, it seemed a necessary item for this band. Finally, I relented, though feeling bad about the inequality of the split. "Look, I appreciate you wanting me to have this piano", I explained "and I'll get it, but only on one condition. After I've had it a few months, I'll probably get really attached to it, so if the group breaks up I don't want you coming round asking for it back." There was a solid consensus of agreement on this, some hand-shaking, back-slapping and other solemn male bonding rituals.

  Two years later, when the band split up, Pip phoned me up. "It's about that Fender Rhodes. I reckon you should sell it and give me half the money. You had more of the advance than I did."

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!!!!!

  I'll leave it to the critics to discuss the merits of Hatfield's music, but there were some elements in it that I loved. Mainly, it was the sense of humour. The bit on the first album where the listener gets lost and rushes from speaker to speaker opening doors in an attempt to find the next track is great. Lots of musicians get mad stoned ideas like this, but very few of them actually record them. Although we presented our live set fairly seriously, there was an element of absurdity there too... Once, in a Dutch club, we filed out on stage and were poised to play our first number. But first, our roadie took this ridiculous little green plastic duck with a spring inside it and a sticky rubber pad on the bottom, and stuck it to the floor at the front of the stage. We even shone a light on it. The idea is that after a while, the rubber pad loses its grip and the duck leaps about 4 foot up in the air.... We sat staring at this thing raptly for about three minutes, and only went it finally went "sprooing" did I count in the first tune.

Hatfield and the North, with Dave Stewart on the right of this photo

  For a certain period - I don't know why - Pip and I were really into smashing garden gnomes on stage. He used to do the actual smashing (it suited his temperament), but I was a willing accomplice, setting aside portions of the group's income for the procurement of gnomes and hammers. After soundchecks, Phil and Richard would retire to the dressing room to tune their guitars (a process I've seen Phil make last about 4 hours) but Pip and I would be off in search of a garden centre. It was sometimes difficult to explain to the assistants why we preferred gnomes that you could smash easily ("but Sir, this model will last you a lifetime!"), but it kept us amused.

  For variation, we once invited the Northettes, who were singing with us at a gig at the Roundhouse in London, to do the gnome smashing. Barbara Gaskin was dead against the idea, on the grounds that it was destructive. I explained the whole quintessential point of the thing was its mindless destructiveness, and, though unconvinced, she agreed to deal the death blows. Took her about three tries, though... These were good quality concrete gnomes, not your cheap plaster rubbish. Sometimes, when no gnomes were available, we'd use teapots instead, by now addicted to the sound of cheap pointless consumer goods being ritually destroyed, and the satisfying crunch of plaster or porcelain fragments underfoot afterwards. The whole thing reached a horrifying climax at a gig we played with Gong, where Pip smashed up a whole tea service and about 6 gnomes. You can imagine how Daevid Allen felt about this. As the 4th or 5th gnome's head left its shoulders, a splinter of gnome material leapt up and gashed open Pip's forehead, just above the eye. It bled quite a bit, and after the gig Daevid came up to him and said "well, smashing up gnomes and teapots - what do you expect?".

  Most of our gigs took place outside of Britain, with the emphasis on France and Holland. Richard's presence in the band helped endear us to the Dutch, who were Caravan-crazy. This caused problems once or twice when unscrupulous promoters actually billed us as "Caravan". In France, where Soft Machine and Gong were like deities, having Phil (who'd played with Robert Wyatt) and Pip (Gong's drummer at the peak of their French popularity) in our ranks swiftly established us as a fixture in their maisons de la culture. We used to draw pretty good crowds and the French, especially, seemed to like us. Britain was, as usual, more difficult. Although the audiences could be great, gigs were always scarcer and less well paid than those in Europe.

  I am very happy with the two albums Hatfield put out, but I felt our live performances were inconsistent. This is perhaps inevitable if you include as much improvisation as we did, but from time to time the looseness and spontaneity would degenerate into a weak, amateurish performance that embarrassed me. This was nobody's fault, but there seemed to be a fragility to our group psyche. We'd go on stage confident, but then a monitor would start feeding back or something and we'd go to pieces. One such gig was the Rainbow Theatre farewell concert, where we played with a few other bands... although the track 'Halfway Between Heaven & Earth' was O.K. (it was recorded, with a new lead vocal added later, and was featured on the 'Over The Rainbow' compilation LP) the rest of the gig was terrible and we came off stage feeling really depressed. This happened more than was comfortable, and although we often went on to do a really steaming gig the next night, you never knew when the Duff Gig Phenomenon would strike again.

  Partly as a reaction to this, I began to write music for the band that was quite tightly controlled and scored. Though it was unlike their own music, the rest of the band  were happy to have a go at it, and although it meant we had to rehearse a bit more, we started to include some of these more complex pieces in our live set. It was interesting to compare the difference of approach between my compositions and Richard Sinclair's - whereas my stuff was all written out and pre-arranged, Richard very rarely presented a finished song, preferring to play through a few chord sequences until he'd la-la'd a vocal tune. The band would throw in some arrangement ideas, and Pip might write some words, and finally (usually a few hours before a gig or recording session) the song would be completed. On paper, these two approaches are incompatible, but in practice they contrasted really well and gave the band some depth.

  Once our first album had been released (and not sold too brilliantly) we realised that we were never going to make any money out of the band. We had no manager, and somehow in the Virgin negotiations we'd given away all our earning power by letting them recoup both our recording and writer' royalties against our recording debt. (Virgin, despite their initial hippie-ish appearance, soon became notorious in the industry for their unfair deals) So, all our recording income was being witheld by Virgin to set against a bill run up in the Manor studios, owned by... Virgin.

  Any gig money seemed to go on repairing the van or the P.A., both of which broke down regularly on alternate weeks. We were on the breadline, and no mistake. The person hit hardest by this was Richard (no, not Branson, stupid!) He and Pip both had families, but whereas Pip had wealthy parents who would occasionally bung him a bit of money or a gross of rusks, Richard had no financial cushion. We went to Virgin and pleaded with them to ease up a bit on the deal, at least release our publishing (ie writers') royalties so we could afford luxuries like food and rent. In a fit of unparalleled generosity which must have put a strain on their capital resources, they gave us all £50 a week for a whole month. Somehow though, despite this huge handout, we still contrived to stay poor - typical shiftless musicians.

  Though we managed to extricate our writers' royalties from 'The Rotters' Club' (the band's 2nd album) things were still desperate, and at one stage things got really serious for Richard - his wife had a 6 week old baby and they had nowhere to live. They stayed in a squat in Croydon for a while, but got chucked out of there. For a time there was even the possibility that the kids might have to be taken into care; I don't remember the details, but it was pretty grim. Throughout this, Virgin's attitude remained the same. "If you want money", Carol Wilson, then head of Virgin Music, said to me, "you should get a proper job, like mine".

   Thanks, Carol.

   'The Rotters' Club' sold little better than its predecessor, and given the incredibly bleak financial circumstances, it was small wonder that the group cracked up. There were other factors, too. We used to have a lot of rows, understandable if you look at our different personalities and how young we were. We all liked each other, but that didn't stop us having the odd screaming argument. Unfortunately, Richard would sometimes continue, or begin, the argument on stage, berating Pip for not listening to what he was playing or making a deliberately ugly noise on his bass instead of playing the bass line. This didn't happen much, but it disturbed me badly. I had this 'the show must go on somehow, even if we're all having brain seizures' attitude, which I felt was the least we could do for an audience who had paid good money to see us. When it became obvious that Richard's sporadic stage outbursts weren't going to stop, and that his difficult personal situation was making him increasingly disaffected with the music, I thought it was time to quit.

  Richard Branson asked me to start up a new Hatfield & The North with new musicians, since ironically there was some American interest in the band and Virgin had found an outlet over there. I told him no thanks; he evidently had no understanding of how a group works, and seemed to think I was the best bet out of the four of us because I was the "together" one who did the accounts. But there was no way any one of us could claim the band name, as like our slightly more successful predecessors The Beatles, we were very much a sum of the parts.

  I was in the band for two and a half years, from early 1973 to 1975. we did at least two BBC radio sessions for John Peel, a couple of French TV shows and had our awful gig at the Rainbow filmed. I only got to see this in 1988, in Tokyo, where some rabid Japanese fans had somehow unearthed the clip. It featured the same tune "Halfway Between Heaven and Earth" featured on the 'Over The rainbow' album, the only decent song of an abysmal set. I was amused to see the video Richard la-la-la-ing while his audio self sang a set of lyrics penned some time after the gig - the miracles of modern science, eh! Modern day fans of Hatfield are always asking me if any gig tapes exist, and I'm sure there are a few around which have ended up on bootleg cassettes etc, but basically the answer is "no". Pip had a very rough tape of two French gigs from which we selected 2 sections for inclusion on our retrospective 'Afters' compilation LP, but we all felt the rest of the material was naff. I don't know what happened to these tapes, and archivists will no doubt continue to torture themselves speculating, but there are no Hatfield & The North major compositions lying around unrecorded. Unlike National Health, the band that followed in the wake of these poverty-stricken days (which, looking back through the gnome dust, seem increasingly like a golden era) Hatfield and The North got to record all their favourite tunes.

  As a postscript to my Hatfield reminiscences, I should point out that I also did the following things while in the band:

a) Rejoined my former Egg colleagues Mont Campbell and Clive Brooks to record 'The Civil Surface'

b) Appeared as a guest (suitably depicted in Tibetan woolly hat) on Fish Hillage's 'Steve Rising' album, which made up a bit for Khan's premature demise

c) Met Robert Wyatt - who used to be married to Pip's wife Pam - and played a concert with him at London's Drury Lane Theatre. Enjoyed the gig, but smashed my thumb during rehearsals fiddling with the hinged back part of Robert's Minimoog. Ouch!

d) Met Alan Gowen, an extremely affable keyboard player who went on to become one of my best mates. At this time, he was living in Barnes, just up the road from pip's flat in Sheen, and had got to know Phil and Richard. Alan had his own band Gilgamesh, and wrote a special 'double quartet' piece for them and Hatfield to co-perform at Leeds Art College (I think - where Alan's girlfriend Celia was an ex-student) and in London (can't remember where). Very enjoyable. When things started getting dodgy with Hatfield, Alan and I started muttering about how one day we would get a band together. That day arrived sooner than we anticipated - Hatfield played their last gig at 'The Winning Post' (huh) in Chertsey in 1975, and I set off back to the paddock to start plans for the new Stewart/Gowen supergroup, 'National Health'.

NATIONAL HEALTH - THE INSIDE STORY

I am myopic, but my memory is good and I remember clearly that the band was named after my spectacles (cheap 'National Health' round frames, now wildly popular in Japan for some reason) in that cheery way musicians have of celebrating physical defects. God knows what the band would have been called if I'd had a hernia or worn an artificial limb...

  1975 was a difficult year to be a thinking rock musician - the halcyon years of 'progressive' rock, when musicians were actually encouraged to be creative and original, were over, and the music industry had gone into a horrid kind of two year gestation period which was to end with the birth of 'punk'. In other words, at the exact point when the British rock business and media were beginning to turn their backs on decent music and gearing themselves up to promote instead some of the most crass, simplistic, brutal, ugly and stupid music imaginable, in an atmosphere where an admitted inability to play one's instrument was hailed as a sign of genius, Alan Gowen and I decided to form a large-scale rock ensemble playing intricate, mainly instrumental music. You can be sure we weren't doing it to be fashionable.

  Our original grandiose ideas for 'The National Health', formulated over the course of several drunken evenings at Alan's flat and based to some degree on those previous enjoyable collaborations between Gilgamesh and the Hatfields, were for a nine-piece band; 2 keyboards, 2 guitars, 3 vocalists, bass and drums. Alan was to play electric piano and synthesiser (the latter an instrument on which he showed astonishing prowess despite not actually owning one) and myself Hammond organ, electric piano and pianet. We would both compose, and the band would attempt to blend my heavily scored music with Alan's more improvisational pieces. We both wanted to include Phil Miller and Phil Lee (the guitarists from our previous bands) and I invited the bassist/composer Mont Campbell from Egg to join as well. This gave us, in July 1975, the nucleus of National Health Mk. 1. I wanted to add vocalists Amanda Parsons, Barbara Gaskin and Ann Rosenthal too, but circumstances, and the intervention of a small amount of common sense, dictated that only Amanda could join, making the band a 7-piece.

  "Drummer wanted. Must be able to play well in unusual time signatures." ran our advertisment in Melody Maker. The amount of trouble we had in finding a suitable drummer for the group still surprises and depresses me. The obvious choice would have been Pip Pyle, but I wanted to do something different with National Health and was concerned that with three ex-members it would turn into Hatfield Mk. 2. So, we advertised. It was hell. After receiving the usual barrage of calls from senile percussionists seeking gigs on cruise ships, guitarists (not quite unable to read, but wondering whether we needed a guitarist as well), axe murderers, contortionists and trapeze artists, and having resisted the temptation to scream obscenities down the 'phone at an insanely confident 14 year old who called me every day for a week pleading for the gig, we auditioned 25 or so applicants - some of them 'names'.

  They were all absolutely pathetic. I was amazed at how any of them had acquired any sort of a reputation, as they all seemed to be completely thrown by our music and unable to play along with it in even the most rudimentary way. I guess the time signatures, which shifted constantly, were the biggest stumbling block; to me and the other embryonic Healthsters they seemed totally natural, but they reduced most of the visitors to our rehearsal space (Alan's front room in Tooting) to a flailing mess of uncoordinated limbs, quivering flesh and dropped sticks.

  Fortunately, someone at Virgin Records had given Bill Bruford my 'phone number, and after dragging a wary Alan Gowen along to a  couple of meetings wherein Bill explained to me and my suspicious partner why it was OK to have been in a group that sold a lot of records, we arranged to have a play together. The first rehearsal went very well - Bill could read music, so our complex arrangements held no terrors for him. We liked his confident style and complete absence of flared trousers, and he seemed to appreciate that we could all more or less get a tune out of our instruments. It was never going to be a permanent arrangement, as Bill had other commitments and was looking eventually to form his own group, but at least we had a drummer to complete the first line up of National Health.

 National Health. L-R: Dave Stewart, Neil Murray, Phil Miller and Pip Pyle
 

  We had absolutely no idea of how we were going to earn a living (in fact, we never did) but at least we had a band now. Encouraged, we began to rehearse a plethora of new compositions. I had written a daft, insanely long piece called 'The Lethargy Shuffle' (actually named after a stupid dance Pip Pyle and I had devised in a Belgian disco one evening) which parodied Glenn Miller and rock'n'roll while maintaining Stravinskyan overtones, plus a more lyrical song in Hatfield style entitled 'Clocks and Clouds'. Alan wrote the delicate, mobile 'Brujo' which, unlike my pieces, had opportunities for group improvisation, and another complex piece called 'Bells'. Mont Campbell, who had been out of the music scene for a while, dusted off his chops and rattled off 'Paracelsus' (beautiful, contrapuntal sections), 'Agrippa' (which sounded like the soundtrack of a mad film in which gigantic mud creatures trudge through primal estuaries) and the demented 'Zabaglione', which is probably the hardest piece of music I've ever played live, and which I shall not attempt to describe. Not to be outdone (you want complex? I got complex!) I wrote 'Tenemos Roads', an epic about ancient civilisations on the planet Mercury inspired by 'The Worm Crouborous'. The Ramones we were not.

  Armed with this fearsome repertoire (and a few others such as 'Trident Asleep' by Alan Gowen and 'Starlight on Seaweed' by Mont Campbell) we set out in January 1976 to terrify the youth of Britain in technical college canteens, leisure centre gymnasiums and all the other unsuitable venues which in this country pass for auditoria. But first, before even stepping on stage, we ran into the first of the 8 billion or so problems that seemed to dog the band throughout its life. Phil Lee, sensing perhaps my residual hostility to bebop solos, pronounced himself unwilling to continue, and departed to undertake a tour backing French singer Charles Aznavour (promptly and cruelly christened "'Asnovoice" by the rest of the band). Fortunately, we were able to call in old mate Steve Hillage on strategic dates to play his parts, but this left us with a temporary drummer and very temporary second guitarist. And, for a while, no singer: Amanda Parsons caught 'flu and missed most of the gigs, including our first London concert.

  After the first tour Mont Campbell left, having been forcibly reminded of the things that first caused him to quit the rock scene in 1973 (the essentially un-spiritual nature of motorway food, the jam sessions at sound-checks where everyone plays a lot of crap, the terrible jokes in the van...) But that was the least of our worries. We were now ready to record our first LP, and though the press rapturously received our winter gigs we had run into a wall of indifference from British record companies. Alan and I had thought that finding a record deal for this band would be easy. How wrong we were...

  Following countless refusals and rejections, things reached a head when Virgin Records turned us down. I had a furious argument with some wretched A&R individual over the reasons. Apparently our music was old fashioned and "unoriginal". "What do you mean, 'unoriginal'?" I screamed, "tell me who else is playing this kind of thing?" "Er, plenty of people. It just sounds like what a lot of other bands have done..."

  Oh yeah? What Virgin had rightly divined, of course, was that this band had MUSICIANS in it, and by some unspoken inter record-company edict that persists to this day, had decreed that musicians were bad news and bands which sported them were NOT TO BE SIGNED. Far better to sign up some good-looking front person who's not particularly interested in music (like the record company) and replace the band, if there is one, with session players or machines. Then you can get down to the real business of making a hit record without all that music stuff getting in the way.

  Anyway, we couldn't get a deal, but continued to hunt for gigs. They were in pretty short supply, too. We replaced Mont Campbell with the youthful Neil Murray (another member of Alan's old band Gilgamesh), re-enlisted Bill as dep. drummer and for the rest of 1976 continued to rehearse and play whatever gigs we could get - about 14, according to my accounts book. But morale was low, and livings had to be earned... Alan got a job playing in a West End sex "comedy" musical called 'Let My People Come', returning home every evening a gibbering wreck after his nightly dose (pardon the expression) of bare buttocks and horrible show music. Amanda Parsons was doing a 'straight' job in Kew Gardens, while I was eking out a living writing lead sheets (ironically) for Virgin Records, immortalising in neat musical script the ravings of bands deemed more worthy of release than National Health, such as Slaughter And The Dogs.... a humbling experience, and a complete waste of ink.

    By 1977 Bill had fled the fold too for the band UK, but we found a permanent drummer, Pip Pyle, who graciously accepted the post despite my initial misgivings, for which he had the good heart not to ridicule me. Much. We now dropped all Mont Campbell's material and embarked on a European tour in February, culminating in a concert at London's Victoria Palace sans Amanda Parsons, who was the next to abandon ship. Alan Gowen left shortly afterwards, fed up with all the personnel changes and general lack of progress. The band never really developed along the lines he had planned for it, which in truth was something more steeped in jazz than the kind of rock orchestra I had envisaged. Either way, this left the band in the sort of shape neither of us would have wanted originally: it had become a rock 4-piece.

  This was kind of tough on me, as most of our material was written for two pairs of hands, and my one pair was already getting enough damage through pounding walls after conversations with record companies. However, around this time some good things started to happen. We met a guy called Mike Dunne who was custodian and engineer of a mobile studio called, imaginatively, 'Mobile Mobile', property of a Famous Rock Star. While the FRS battled to find musical inspiration in the Bahamas, Mike set about recording groups he liked at very reasonable rates, such as nothing. With the mobile Mobile set up in a rehearsal room in London's Victoria, we were able to sneak in between or after paying clients' sessions and record our first album. Thanks to Mike, and aided by the return of the prodigal Alan Gowen and Amanda Parsons (who gladly returned as temporary recording guests) we finally got to make our first LP in March 1977.

  No-one wanted to put it out, of course, but at least we had a tape. Then another good thing happened. We were invited to play at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, as part of a series of concerts called "Really Cultural Rock Music played by Serious Men with Beards" (or something). I was impressed, and excited to get the opportunity to play at what I considered to be a prestigious venue. Eager to justify the gig as high art, and fill in some of the gaps in our sound left by Alan's departure, I set about scoring some of our pieces for a woodwind quintet. We also invited Richard Sinclair to sing with us, and began a week's rehearsals. All for this one gig.

  Subsequent events served to underline just how shittily Britain can treat its musicians, even (or specially) the really cultural serious bearded ones. My first problem was getting someone to tell us what time we were supposed to play at the QEH. At rock gigs, it doesn't matter - you just go on when everyone's drunk enough, but at a concert like this, with the audience ushered in with little gongs five minutes before the concert begins and ten musicians preparing to go on and off stage in a cultural fashion, a starting time is essential. We called the agency who'd booked us. They said they would write the playing time into the contract. The contract arrived two days before the gig - and no playing time. We rang the agency. They said they would call us back. They didn't.

  I arrived at the QEH having guessed what time we would go on from a poster I saw in a railway station. When I got there I found that our lighting engineer was being refused access to the lights, and that no-one had our lighting plan (which we had sent in two weeks previously) Having been assured that we would have the full co-operation of the QEH by the agency, this made me pretty angry. Finally, after our soundcheck, a guy from the agency approached me and told me we were due on at 7:30. It was then 7:10; I'd sent the woodwind players away for some food, assuring them that we wouldn't be on until 8. The guy from the agency had been sitting in the hall all afternoon (unknown to me) while we soundchecked, and only now did he reveal our playing time. What was it, classified information?

  We stalled until 7:45, but finally had to go on. When I went on stage, the woodwind players still hadn't returned from their meal, and I had no way of knowing if they would make it back in time for their first number. But THE SHOW MUST GO ON! (Why? How?)

  We started the set. When it came to the time for the woodwind stuff, I said to the audience, "Ladies and gentlemen. For the next tune we are supposed to be joined by 5 woodwind players. Due to the incompetence of the agency that booked us, they left the building some time ago and I don't know if they've come back. But let's see what happens..."

  Bless their hearts, they all walked on stage dead on cue, having come back early from their meal. Not one of them was still eating.

  It might seem like a little thing to you, but if the wood-winders hadn't showed up I think I might easily have soiled my trousers in front of 1,000 concertgoers. Anyway, this particular clothing disaster averted, the rest of the gig went very well. At the end, the crowd demanded an encore, whistling and stamping their feet. But having gone on "late", we had "over-run" by 15 minutes. Horror! Outrage! The QEH staff said we could not do an encore. They turned all the lights out on stage, but we went on anyway. Fuck them. I groped my way to the front of the stage and found a microphone. 'Please turn the lights on' I shouted. Nothing happened. So, with the audience screaming and cheering, we began to play our encore in total darkness, with our road manager shining a torch on flautist Jimmy Hastings' music so he could negotiate his way through Phil Millers' 'Underdub' - hard enough to play even in broad daylight. After two minutes, the lights came back on to a great roar from the crowd... but the psychological damage had been done.

  Important concert? Prestigious venue? BOLLOCKS. I've played some shit venues in my time, including the Zoom Club in Frankfurt where there are no doors on the toilets to discourage Heroin users from shooting up; the Mobileritz in Antwerp, frequented mainly by transvestites who ignore the band but cheer the blue slide show afterwards; I've played at really dodgy pubs and clubs in London and once in France in a disused abattoir - but NOWHERE have I ever been this badly treated. But worse was to come. No doubt feeling that we had not yet been sufficiently humiliated, the agency witheld our fee because of "offensive" (i.e. truthful) remarks I had made on stage, and to cover the "extra fees" due to the QEH because of our late start.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRGGGHHH!

  We repeated the experiment of augmenting the quartet with five woodwinds and a guest vocalist at the Roundhouse in London later that year, but this time no-one went out of their way to sabotage the gig. And we got some more good news. Joop Visser of Charly Records heard our tape and LIKED it! He even listened to it all the way through without making any 'phone calls. We did a deal for the LP to be released on Charly's Affinity label, and with our advance paid Mike Dunne back just in time - the Famous Rock Star had returned from his holidays and wanted his studio bills settled. The LP, entitled 'National Health' (a cunning pun on our name) came out in early 1978.

  Of course, this was all a bit too good to be true, so almost immediately Neil Murray left the group. After all, no-one had left for a while, and Neil didn't want this bi-annual tradition to fall into dis-use... Also, he had been offered a gig with Whitesnake, a rock band who went on to become enormously popular (much to our surprise) Luckily, we were able to replace him speedily with John Greaves, an old mate from the good old days at Virgin Records when Henry Cow and Hatfield & The North were on the label; before the terrible Night Of The Accountants (Wankernacht) when smart young men in suits ran amok through Virgin's roster, smashing and burning anything tainted with the forbidden word MUSIC.

  John, having spent a portion of his youth playing bass in his dad's show band, could read music. Oh joy, Oh bliss. He actually sight-read parts of 'Tenemos Roads' while listening to a cassette of the tune, which pleased me no end. After a few gigs in Belgium which acclimatized him musically and socially (we got through around 8,000 bottles of wine) we set off on our most intensive touring period ever.

  First we toured France for the whole of March, which was great. By now we had reverted to the old Hatfield democratic style of everyone contributing compositions, so we played 'Dreams Wide Awake' by Phil Miller, 'Twins & Trios' by John Greaves, and Pip's song about TV boredom 'A Legend In His Own Lunchtime', later retitled 'Binoculars' to avoid some obscure copyright problem. We were still playing 'Tenemos Roads' and 'Borogoves', and had recently mastered 'The Collapso', which we played with great verve, huge volume and occasional accuracy.

  A certain theatricality began to creep into our stage presentation during this tour, perhaps because of the prolonged exposure to excitable Gallic audiences. Normally slightly shy of microphones, I found myself increasingly eager to address the crowd in my appalling French, turning short announcements into long, crazed anecdotes that nobody understood. We introduced a spot in the show called 'The Unconventional Musician Of The Year Competition', in which Pip, John and myself would vie with each other to play our instruments in the most ludicrous manner. Phil was exempted because his basic playing style was so eccentric anyway. Pip would pour bags of marbles over his cymbals; John would attempt to eat his bass guitar; I would climb up on top of my Hammond organ and walk around all over my keyboards. I went off this competition a bit when John got a touch over-exuberant one night during his zany contribution and smashed my plug board with his bass.

  We arranged to play the support slot on Steve Hillage's spring tour of the UK (April/May 1978). This turned out to be a financial disaster for us; we had to pay to get on the tour, but convinced Charly Records to advance us the money, reckoning the exposure would help sales of our album. The reverse was true. The album was selling pretty well until we started the tour, but as soon as we did the first date, sales miraculously stopped dead. Although the tour had its dreary aspects (majority of audience in the bar when we came on; psychotic bouncers at great venues like Portsmouth Top Rank Suite determined to give us a hard time; only being allowed to use some of the lights because we weren't the top band...) it had the advantage of enabling us to sharpen up our material, and as soon as the tour was over we began plans to record our second album. The Mobile Mobile was now immobilized at Ridge Farm Studios, then a rehearsal room, and after a few glib promises of payment to Mike Dunne we slipped in and began recording 'Of Queues and Cures'.

  Not all the material on this album was rehearsed: 'Squarer for Maud' was more or less written in the studio, a process which made me uneasy at the time but which were totally vindicated by the magnificent final result. Most of the other tunes were laid down pretty quickly - I think we did 'The Collapso' in one or two takes, with no stops. As Ridge Farm was situated in a beautiful rural area in Surrey and it was a hot summer, we did a fair bit of recording outside in the open air. Most of Georgie Born's cello overdubs were recorded on the lawn outside the studio - if you solo her track on the master tape you can hear 'planes flying overhead.

  As it says on the liner notes of 'Of Queues', we were so pleased by Georgie's contribution to the album that we asked her to join the band, along with her ex-Henry Cow colleague Lindsay Cooper, who played woodwinds and sax. I was very pleased with the second album, which had the great advantage (unlike the first) of being recorded when the material was fairly fresh, yet well rehearsed - a hard combination to achieve. However, paradoxically enough it was at this time that I began to lose my faith with the band, and before long I was to leave.

  Towards the end of 1978 we did some very promising rehearsals with Georgie and Lindsay, supposedly to prepare for a tour of France and Italy. Some of the stuff we did was great, including part of a Lindsay Cooper piece called 'Half The Sky' (originally recorded by the Art Bears) which I loved. But, as I saw it, an element of musical anarchy began to creep in, which I perceived as destructive. The band were really keen to play at least some 'free' music, which I've never liked - it all sounds the same to me, and in my opinion is more riddled with cliches than any other, more strictly organised forms. Then there was the strong feeling that everyone should write something for the band, and the band should play it as a matter of principle. I alone wanted the right of censorship or refusal, having a strong idea of what I felt National Health should sound like. Rightly or wrongly, I considered it was my band, and I wanted a lot of control over the noise it made.

  The final straw was none of these potentially solvable musical problems, but an argument about organisation. A couple of weeks before the tour was due to begin, I heard from the agent that half the dates had fallen through. This was nothing new, and the dates were probably imaginary anyway, but the financial effects were disastrous. It meant that we could only afford to take one roadie, who would have to double as sound man, and no lighting equipment. Pissed off at the agent and the world in general for making it so bloody difficult to keep this band going, I voted to call off the remaining dates and find ourselves another agent. Here again I found myself in a minority of one. The others wanted to go.

  When you're really in love with a band and its music, you will go anywhere and do anything for the chance to play. In Egg I used to sometimes travel to gigs lying across my organ pedals in the back of the van - we once drove 400 miles to play a gig for £25 in a venue called The Dead End Club (attractive name, huh?) Earlier in the Health's career, we would quite happily go for two or three days without sleep to get to a European gig without incurring hotel bills. But for me, the affair was over. I quit. I just didn't think it would ever get any better.

  There were some angry words wafted in my general direction which I returned with interest, but nothing of any lasting significance. The worst thing was that Georgie and Lindsay had done about a month's work for nothing, and we never got to show off the fruits of those rehearsals. Oh well... I guess finally it was OK for me to leave my own band, because, after all, everybody else had!

  I did one last gig with the Health in January 1979 on 'The Old Grey Whistle Test' for BBC TV. The show had been booked for months and it would have looked bad if I had not done it. We did an extremely approximate version of 'The Collapso', during the introduction of which John finally clinched the Unconventional Musician All- Comers Cup by hurling a box of cutlery across the stage. Pip and I were too stunned to put up a challenge. 'Of Queues and Cures' was released in January by Charly Records, and the band set out to find a replacement for me. This proved fairly easy - Alan Gowen was ready to get involved again, and by February the new quartet (sans Lindsay and Georgie) had a new set rehearsed and was ready to tour Europe and Scandinavia once again. Quick work.

  Talking to the roadies about this tour when they came back a month later, I was kind of glad to have missed it. Apparently they drove from Helsinki to Barcelona (a drive no sane mind would even contemplate) just to do one gig; were treated like scum in Scandinavia, misbooked into discos and had equipment stolen from a dingy club in Paris. Sounds like loads of fun. I, meanwhile, was penniless and back at the hated lead sheets (Virgin were now releasing a lot of reggae albums, impossible to write out) but somehow sensed that I had done the right thing in leaving.

  As it turned out, the Health's days were numbered, but there was one last mountain to climb... AMERICA. The band had never made it to the USA, but had a strong cult following over there bordering on the maniacal. I only became fully aware of the depths of these lunatics' devotion when I went there in summer 1979 with Bill Bruford. At every show, people would scream out 'Tenemos Roads' and 'Paracelsus', as if expecting us to drop our set and suddenly launch into a 4 year old Mont Campbell composition. One guy came up to me after a gig and said, "uh... is it true that Pip Pyle is, uh... entirely made of metal?" Jesus. I assured him that this was in fact absolutely true, Pip was made of zinc alloy due to a childhood accident at a steelworks. He went away looking satisfied.

  Given the almost mythological status of the band, it was relatively easy for me to cobble together half a dozen contacts who could work on fixing up a small US tour for them. To my delight, this became reality towards the end of the year. Although Pip had to practically sell his children into slavery to raise the money for the fares, and, as usual, half the dates fell through at the last moment, I was proud to see them go off in November 1979 to "go down a storm in the States", as we used to say. Give them hell, lads.

  It would seem that no quarter was asked, and none given in the Health's last lunge at the big time. Readers of tender sensibilities will thank me for not revealing the full details of the merry-making, but I understand that the man of zinc and his three trusty cohorts managed to severely deplete the country's alcohol reserves and play a lot of good music into the bargain. Towards the end of the tour, a little short of material, they were encoring with a berserk version of the Rolling Stones' "Walk The Dog". I wish I'd been there - I like that tune.

  It remained to see out the decade, and do one more tour of Scandinavia in May 1980, though why they would want to go back there beats me. Afterwards, that was it: Alan had had enough, for good this time, and in March he split, closely followed by the rest of the band. Pip and John both had other musical projects by this time and Phil - the only original member who NEVER LEFT - had been in the band for five years. I hereby award him the D.S. gold medal for group loyalty - it's 1990 now, and he and Pip are still playing together (in Incahoots) What of the others? Amanda Parsons works for a television company, Mont Campbell was planning to go off around the world recording folk music last time I spoke to him, John Greaves is now based in Paris and is working on solo projects, and Neil Murray is currently on tour with Black Sabbath. I'm serious!

  I wasn't looking forward to writing this bit, but in May 1981 Alan Gowen died of leukaemia. His death shook us all up, and in the weeks that followed we got the band back together to play a small gig. Ostensibly it was to raise money for the funeral, that kind of thing, but it became something more. We played some  unreleased material of Alan's, pieces he'd carefully arranged and notated but never recorded. It seemed natural to go on and record an LP of this stuff, as it all sounded so good. In October 1981, with finance from John-Pierre Weiller (an old friend of Alan and his wife Celia) we recorded 'D.S. Al Coda' - a memorial to Alan and his music. We took the liberty of adding "By National Health" to attract our small but devoted band of admirers.

With thanks to Mick Dillingham, and of course Dave Stewart. © Ptolemaic Terrascope 1989. Produced by Phil McMullen for Terrascope Online, 2007.

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